A Business Goal Driven Approach for Understanding and Specifying Information Security Requirements

In this paper we present an approach for specifying and prioritizing information security requirements in organizations. It is important to prioritize security requirements since hundred per cent security is not achievable and the limited resources available should be directed to satisfy the most important ones. We propose to link explicitly security requirements with the organization’s business vision, i.e. to provide business rationale for security requirements. The rationale is then used as a basis for comparing the importance of different security requirements. A conceptual framework is presented, where the relationships between business vision, critical impact factors and valuable assets (together with their security requirements) are shown.